Our body battery is the most important battery we have, and many of us don’t know how to keep it charged.

Like our phones, we have an internal battery that depletes from use. Unlike our phone, we don’t have a cord to plug into the wall to recharge it. This means we can run on empty for a long period of time without us, or anyone around us, knowing that we are fully drained.

Having a full body battery is what it takes to be our best selves, get our work done, create new ideas, and manage our relationships well. Our batteries, like our phones, are getting drained by things we are aware of and things that are running in the background.

The interesting thing about our body battery is that the same things that drain us can also charge us. Working long hours on something that is meaningful to you will make you tired, but feed your sense of purpose. Working with people you care about drains your social battery, but charges your feeling of connection. The drain and the charge can come from the same place.

Recently at Geigsen we decided to make more of an effort to work in our New York office. We travel a lot for work so we had gotten into the habit of working from home on days we weren’t on the road. Most of our team is in the New York area, so we wanted to get our office culture back on track. I love our office days. We get a chance to collaborate in person and just generally pal around and have fun.

But at the end of each office day, I am exhausted in a way I never feel at the end of a work from home day.

My office days start with a 6am jump out of bed, down a coffee, walk the dog, get home, take a Peloton class, shower, rush to the train, navigate Penn Station, walk the five blocks to the office, stand in line at Gregory’s for coffee number two, spend the day in the constant company of our team in an open concept office, rush back to Penn Station, wait in the crush of people for the track to be announced, find a seat, get back to my station, walk home, make dinner, walk the dog, and crash.

My work from home days look similar but feel really different. I still get out of bed at 6, but I sit and have a coffee and read the paper, walk the dog, take a Peloton class, shower, walk the ten steps to my home office, get some work done before meetings start, go downstairs for more coffee, and spend the day generally alone unless I am on a call. I end my work day around 6, make dinner and eat with my family, go upstairs and get some writing done, walk the dog, read a book, and fall asleep.

On my work from home days my body battery at the end of the day is still a solid 30 to 40. When I go into the office, it is a solid negative 10.

Neither day is bad. The office day has real value, the collaboration, the energy of being with the team, the creativity that comes from being in the same room as people I enjoy. But it has a real cost too. And knowing that cost lets you plan for it, protect recovery time around it, and make conscious choices about how you spend your energy rather than just feeling mysteriously wiped out at the end of the day.

Understanding what drains and charges your body battery is one of the most useful things you can do for your overall wellbeing. It helps to look at it across three layers.

At Layer 1, the transactional things you do every day have a physical cost, and those costs add up in ways most people don’t account for. It is not just the big things. It is the commute, the back to back meetings, the constant context switching between tasks, the standing in line at Gregory’s, the navigating Penn Station at rush hour. Each of those things is a small withdrawal from the account, and by the end of the day the balance is lower than you realize. When you start paying attention to your Layer 1 costs, you begin to see patterns you never noticed before.

At Layer 2, the drains are more subtle and often more significant. Every time your emotional and psychological programs get triggered, a difficult colleague, a stressful decision, a conversation that doesn’t go the way you hoped, your battery takes a hit. An unmanaged Human Operating System is one of the biggest drains most people never think to account for, because it is running in the background without them realizing it. When your HOS is well managed, the same situations cost you less. You recover faster, you stay more present, and you have more left at the end of the day.

At Layer 3, maintaining awareness of how you are doing across all of it takes energy too. Paying attention to yourself in real time, noticing when your HOS is getting triggered, catching the moment before a conversation goes sideways or a decision gets made from the wrong place, none of that is effortless. But it is the kind of energy expenditure that pays you back many times over. A well managed HOS costs less to run than an unmanaged one, and the awareness that keeps it well managed is what prevents the deeper, harder to recover from depletion that happens when you are running on empty without realizing it. This is also part of why working from home costs less. When you are alone, you are not navigating other people triggering your operating system on the fly. There is no one in the open concept office whose mood affects yours, no Penn Station crowd to absorb, no reading of the room required. Your HOS gets a quieter day, and your battery reflects that.

Knowing what charges you is just as important as knowing what drains you. Take a moment to actually make a list. What are the things that reliably restore you? For most people it includes things like time in nature, meaningful conversations, creative work, physical movement, rest, and being with people they love. But your list is yours and it is worth knowing specifically what is on it, because the generic advice to rest and recharge is not enough. You need to know what actually works for you and then protect time for it, because when your battery is low everything else suffers, your work, your relationships, and your ability to show up as the cultivated self we talked about in our last post.

In our next post we will talk about working alliances, the relationships at work that matter most and how to build the ones that will help you thrive for all 90,000 hours.

Do you ever end the day completely wiped out and not quite understand why? The work wasn’t harder than usual. Nothing went wrong. But the battery is empty.

What is often happening on those days is not just the commute or the back to back meetings, although those have a cost. It is that when you are with other people all day, you are constantly navigating your own emotional and psychological programs in response to them. That takes energy in a way that a quieter day simply does not.

We call this your body battery, and most people are spending it without knowing what they are spending it on.

Understanding what drains your battery and what charges it is one of the most useful things you can do for yourself at work. And it is worth looking at more carefully than most of us do.